The present disclosure relates to a vehicle control device and method, and particularly, to a control device and method.
A plurality of electric control units (ECUs) having microcontrollers are installed in a vehicle. Debugging and calibration of internal system variables are required to develop ECUs.
In order to calibrate a conventional ECU in a vehicle, a laptop computer is directly connected to a control area network (CAN) communication line of the vehicle through a cable and environment variables are updated.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a conventional communication system between a vehicle and an external device.
Referring to FIG. 1, a CAN communication module 30 is added for communication between a vehicle 10 and a monitoring/control device 20. The vehicle 10 includes an on board diagnostics (OBD) 11 for diagnosing a state of the vehicle, wherein the OBD transmits, to the monitoring/control device, result data obtained through CAN communication with function units in the vehicle. Furthermore, in order to transmit control data for environment variables from the monitoring/control device, the data should be converted into a format compatible with the CAN communication through the CAN communication module.
In general, the OBD 11 is connected to the monitoring/control device such as a computer or a laptop using the CAN-module-installed interface 30 so as to transfer environment variables for calibrating an ECU. Thereafter, the monitoring/control device updates the environment variables of the ECU using an ECU calibration application program.
According to the above-mentioned system, the OBD 11 should be connected to the monitoring/control device 30 by wire and an additional data conversion device is required, causing spatial limitation and additional cost.